Miami’s unlikely turnaround excites local insurer, former Dolphin

You don’t earn the nickname “The Human Bowling Ball” by being elusive. In fact, the man behind the nickname, former Miami Dolphin Don Nottingham, was quite the opposite.

By Andy MarksStaff writer

BELLEVIEW — You don’t earn the nickname “The Human Bowling Ball” by being elusive.In fact, the man behind the nickname, former Miami Dolphin Don Nottingham, was quite the opposite.“If you came around me, I’m gonna knock you down,” Nottingham said with a smile. “Football’s great that way. You push a little harder than the guy who’s pushing you and good things happen.“It doesn’t work that way in golf.”Nottingham, who lives in Marion County and owns and operates an insurance agency in Belleview, made his name as a 5-foot-9, 225-pound touchdown specialist with an extremely low center of gravity. He won a Super Bowl ring in 1974 and finished his seven-year career with 2,496 rushing yards and 34 touchdowns. He played alongside storied football names such as Johnny Unitas, Bubba Smith, John Mackey, Larry Csonka and Earl Morrall.And he almost always won. Nottingham was drafted by the Baltimore Colts after its 1970 championship season, then traded to Miami in 1973. His teams went a combined 64-34 and he played in two AFC Championship Games and a Super Bowl.All of which made the 2007 Dolphins’ 1-15 campaign hard to stomach for a guy who still bleeds aqua and orange.“It was pretty tough to swallow,” he said. “I kind of felt like they weren’t upset enough that they were losing.”Things have changed in a hurry for last year’s laughingstock. Under the guidance of new team president Bill Parcells and new head coach Tony Sparano, Miami completed a remarkable turnaround in 2008 by going 11-5 and winning the AFC East. The Dolphins host the Baltimore Ravens (11-5) today at 1 p.m. in the AFC playoffs, a game Nottingham will be watching closely.“I think there were a lot of people playing in Dolphin uniforms (last year) who were just happy to have a uniform,” he said. “Now I think they’re being challenged in practice and the bar is going up. You can say it’s Parcells, it’s Sparano, it’s all the coaches down there. You’ve got the kids going onto the practice field with some focus“Then, when you step on the game field, the expectation is to win,” he added. “It’s amazing how much a positive mental attitude will work for you.”It’s an attitude Nottingham is familiar with, because his Dolphins teams — led by the NFL’s all-time winningest coach Don Shula — were brimming with confidence. Nottingham likens them to this decade’s New England Patriots, who won three Super Bowls despite not having many big-name players.“We knew how to get into a game plan,” Nottingham said. “If you were going to beat the Dolphins, you’d have to beat them with your next-best offensive play. Whatever your bread and butter was, it wasn’t gonna work. We were gonna take that away from you.”One star player the Dolphins did have was Csonka, the Hall of Fame fullback. And that’s exactly why Nottingham wasn’t initially thrilled with his move from Baltimore to Miami. As a Colt, Nottingham had earned a starting role in the backfield. He scored five touchdowns as a rookie and his future as a fullback looked bright.Then, all of a sudden, he was traded to the team that already had arguably the best fullback in NFL history starting in its backfield.“I figured I’ll be covering kickoffs for the rest of my life,” Nottingham said, laughing. “I wasn’t that happy coming to Miami, but it worked out. Shula has a way of getting the most out of everything he had. I was a good lead blocker. I was on all the special teams, of course, but I got to be involved in the goal-line offense so I got to score a lot of touchdowns.”As for the nickname, it was introduced to the mainstream by Monday Night Football broadcasting legend Howard Cosell. But Nottingham said it was actually started by former Colts teammate Ray May, a linebacker who was on the wrong end of a violent collision with Nottingham, then a rookie, during training camp and suffered a shoulder injury because of it.“He jumped up screaming ‘you can’t get no lower than no cotton-picking bowling ball,’ ” Nottingham recalled.“Except he didn’t say ‘cotton-picking.’ He was kind of upset.”Nottingham began to notice the game changing later in the 1970s. The NFL’s popularity was soaring and rookies coming into the league were bigger and faster than ever before. Nottingham’s advantages — his balance, his power, his surprising quickness for his build — were being nullified.Nottingham was accustomed to bulldozing 225-pound linebackers early in his career, but when the Dolphins selected Kim Bokamper — an absolute giant of a linebacker in those days at 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds — before the 1977 season, he could see the writing on the wall.Bokamper “was bigger than me, but he’s also quicker than I am so I can’t outshift him or anything,” Nottingham said. “I broke my shoulder in the summer of ’78 and that’s when I decided it was time to get out of this game. Those guys were getting too big.”It’s a decision that probably served him well, because Nottingham today looks remarkably young and fit for a man whose calling card was using his body to blow up defenders at the goal line.At age 59, he still looks like he could knock down a linebacker or two.“I feel unbelievably humbled just to have been a part of the NFL,” he said. “When I was in high school I didn’t dream about it. When I was in college I didn’t dream about it.“I was a pretty good football player,” he added, “but those guys were on a whole different plane.”

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